This invention relates generally to novelty items made of paper or other sheet material having pressure-sensitive adhesive for affixing such item in operative position and more particularly to items of this type which can be fabricated without the use of sophisticated manufacturing equipment.
Pop-ups have fairly recently become frequently used in advertising and in other promotional endeavors and as novelty items to either attract attention or simply for purposes of decoration. Whereas many of these pop-up items were developed for use in mass direct-mail solicitations and the like, they have recently become of commercial interest in a form where strategically located areas of pressure-sensitive adhesive permit the simple placement of the pop-up by the recipient in an attention-attracting location.
Examples of such pressure-sensitive adhesive-bearing pop-ups are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,078,670 issued Jan. 7, 1992, U.S. Pat. No. 5,181,901, issued Jan. 26, 1993, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,346,455 issued Sep. 13, 1994. A variation of such pop-up items is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,592,573, see FIGS. 6-17.
These patents variously show pop-up items which are fabricated by the application of adhesive, both pressure-sensitive adhesive and bonding or permanent adhesive, to selective locations on a web in order to facilitate the mass production of such pop-up items. Generally, the fabricating methods shown utilize the application of release coatings or release liner materials to selectively interface with and/or protect the pressure-sensitive adhesive regions in the fabricated product. Accordingly, many of these embodiments require relatively sophisticated fabrication equipment to permit their efficient manufacture. Accordingly, improved pop-up designs have continued to be sought to simplify such manufacture.
Improved pop-up constructions are herein provided for the fabrication of pop-up elements having exterior surfaces which carry pressure-sensitive adhesive. It has been found that pop-up items can be designed so that production can be carried out by simply kiss-cutting composite sheet material which comprises a front sheet held by an overall pressure-sensitive adhesive pattern to a rear liner sheet, enabling them to be efficiently mass-produced at high speed. The overall pressure-sensitive adhesive pattern can completely cover the rear surface of the front sheet, as is commonly done in sheets of pressure-sensitive labels designed for use as a roll or as individual sheets for preparing address labels or the like using the electronic data processing (EDP); for example, 8xc2xdxc3x9711 sheets of multiple rectangular labels that are provided for printing sheets of mailing address labels, using laser printers attached to computers, can be kiss-cut to create pop-up items.
More specifically, the composite sheet is die-cut by kiss-cutting to create a planar pop-up structure in the front sheet that is divided into two halves which are generally symmetrical about a central fold-line and which, upon folding, provide a flag unit and at least two interconnected subpanels which have pressure-sensitive adhesive on exposed surfaces thereof and which are strategically located so as to support the flag unit in its desired operative, attention-attracting, 3-dimensional orientation. Alternatively, such adhesive pattern need not be complete; instead it could be provided in any regular pattern such that, by registration of the location of the pop-up structure on the front sheet, the pressure-sensitive regions will be strategically located to provide the desired exposed pressure-sensitive regions at key locations, i.e. on supporting subpanels, and to also appropriately join certain flag sections to one another in the finished product to create the flag unit.